All 31.0 - Sealing the Second Rift
Victor agreed to adopt Nuan and Xue; no one objected. The girls, along with Virgil and Lucca’s new pet cat Xiao Pang, went to Engiadina to wait out the last of the increasingly dangerous adventures with Caitlyn and Cheko. After dropping them off, the group teleported to Duvallon to check in with Bastion and to drop off their new moon pearl for Xander to attune it. Pierce learned the ritual from the two people there. The next morning, they teleported outside of Maopingzhen, the city that had fallen to the All under Clover’s and Tarragon’s watch. The freezing aura had blanketed the entire area, spreading out well beyond the city’s walls. It had been gently raining at the time, leaving painful, fixed flecks in the air that needed to be avoided or walked through like barbed wire. There were several instances of oddity: a chicken yard where the birds were standing in orderly rows; a wagon that had been disassembled and sorted into its component parts and left beside the road. Invisibly entering the city, they found more strangely placed items, as well as people frozen in states of panic and lined up or arranged in front of houses. The All were sorting things to a standard that made no sense in this plane. Shares were everywhere and Completes wandered about, moving things. Moving towards the center of the city, they found a strange, metallic wall. It started as a microscopic edge and quickly widened into a wedge, dividing what was once a single road into two paths. Lucca, Victor, Pierce and Cohen took one side, while Cress, Clover, Ryuji and Tarragon took the other. Equipped with a spell that allowed telepathic communication, the groups separated. Both teams followed the wall, finding that it bent around and eventually led them away from the town’s center. Lucca’s team was met with a blocked alley, crowded with frozen people. He tried to avoid them by turning into a bird and flying into an open window, but found no better way to advance. Squeezing through (and knowing that the All were hunting them), the group found more of the grey walls, starting to box them in. Deciding that hiding was no longer an option, the group made to attack one of the walls. Where it was struck, it unravelled into a series of arms that had at one point formed the unbroken wall. The arms reached to grab them, but was beaten back. The wall-like All, Component, attacked them with a gas attack. Pierce summoned a wind elemental to blow the smoke away. With a hole broken in the wall from the other's weapons, Pierce managed to Dimension Door them to the other side, though the walls continued to move and reform, boxing them in again. Fighting their way out of an increasingly complicated box, they realized that they were still getting farther from their target. Pierce instructed the elemental to pick them up. Flying, they moved towards the center of town. Messages from the other team informed them that they were trapped in the Component’s clutches themselves, unable to break free. The walls of Component spread about the city, visible now as a giant net or spider web that laced between and through the buildings. They had to seal the rift quickly before they could begin to clear out the invaders. When they set down, Pierce immediately began casting the ritual to seal the rift. They were swiftly captured by Component once more, and the others all struggled to protect Pierce. Cohen used a smoke bomb to try and give themselves some cover, though it assisted the enemy nearly as much as them. Eventually they noticed that they were missing more than striking; the wind elemental blew away the smoke. Component was gone: a strange, fountain-like object floated some distance away, and tens of thousands of Shares stared at them from all directions. They watched Pierce cast the spell, enraptured, trying to deduce what he was doing and how he was doing it. When he was very nearly finished, the fountain, Totality, announced that it had learned what it had needed. It began to attack with a variety of spells. They managed to weather the spells and attack the being, which got progressively weaker as it leaked more of its sustaining fluid. Pierce managed to keep his concentration, completing the ritual and sealing the rift. Totality was shattered and sent back to its own plane, but the thousand eyes of the Shares still judged them.Category:Advent of the All